Is IQ and baby formula study a ploy?

Some breast-feeding experts and advocates suspect a new study is a marketing ploy to encourage parents to feed their infants formula. The study found that infants receiving formula supplemented with the omega-3 fatty acid, DHA, performed better on a cognitive test than infants who were given formula without it.

Even though this study doesn’t indicate that the DHA formula is better than breast milk, experts claim formula company’s nutritional claims are often aimed at making parents believe that formula is superior to mom’s milk. They think DHA-fortified formula is a marketing tactic to replace breast milk.

“The marketing has actually dissuaded mothers from choosing exclusive breast-feeding, which is preferred from all the outcomes that we understand,” Dr. Lori Feldman-Winter, a pediatrician with Cooper University Hospital in Camden, N.J., told ABCNews.com.

“It is clear that the food industry fascination with nutraceuticals (strategically fortified food products) is now spreading into infant formula,” Barbara Moore, president and CEO of Shape Up America!, told ABCNews.com in an e-mail. “This is a disturbing new development. We have parents thinking that sticking their tiny infants in front of a Baby Einstein video will improve their child’s mental development when the data suggest that parent-child interactions (and plenty of them) are the most critical factor for such development. Now parents will be encouraged to forego breast-feeding–which is optimal for both mothers and babies–in favor of a hyped up infant formula.”

Research has shown that children who were breast fed as infants have superior cognitive skills compared to those given infant formula, and many scientists have found this is due to an essential fatty acid in breast milk called docosahexaenoic acid (DHA). The new study published in the September/October 2009 Child Development journal indicated that babies fed formula supplemented with DHA have higher cognitive skills than babies fed regular formula.

The researchers studied 229 infants, who received either formula supplemented with DHA or traditional infant formula. (The formula used in the study was provided to the researchers by a manufacturing company for free.) The babies were given the different formulas either shortly after birth, after six weeks of breast-feeding, or after four to six months of breast-feeding. When they were nine months old, they were given a problem-solving test in which they had to complete a sequence of steps to get a rattle.

Babies who were fed formula supplemented with DHA were more likely to get the rattle and showed more intentional behaviors that allowed them to get the rattle.

“Currently, there is no clear consensus on whether infant formula should be supplemented with DHA,” notes lead author James R. Drover, a former postdoctoral fellow at the Retina Foundation of the Southwest who is now assistant professor of psychology at Memorial University in Canada.

“However, our results clearly suggest that feeding infants formula supplemented with high concentrations of DHA provides beneficial effects on cognitive development. Furthermore, because infants who display superior performance on the means-end problem-solving task tend to have superior IQ and vocabulary later in childhood, it’s possible that the beneficial effects of DHA extend well beyond infancy.”

What do you think? Are formula companies really out to replace breast milk and convince moms to not breast-feed? Or are they simply looking to improve their product for moms who are uncomfortable breast-feeding or who are unable to?